That may not be their intended purpose, but it is something we take note of when responding to an MVA. “Who else was in the vehicle” is a pretty standard question to ascertain if someone has been ejected, or is currently entrapped in the inaccessible wreckage, but if we notice a ‘baby on board’, we always make sure to also ask something along the lines of “where is your baby”, just to be safe.
To clarify, you have a dongle paired with this keyboard permanently attached to the machine?
To get a step deeper into your “how can a machine draw a circle” question. Mostly it can’t. Even with an open-loop control system dragging the ‘pen’ at a fixed angle, you would need to have defined that curve in software somewhere, where it will be a barely-noticable set of X-Y steps, not a pure curve, otherwise you cannot be sure it would return to the origin.
Luckily, you only need a few decimals of pi to approximate that far beyond what any human eye could discern.
Break any digitally defined curve down far enough and you will see those discrete steps, but with modern technology, we just never notice it.
Literally our lead developer:
“you wouldn’t be so confident in the results if you saw the half-assed code I whipped up for than in a single afternoon five years ago”
That answers my question. If the USB dongle never disconnects from the machine, then I wouldn’t expect anything to show in dmesg, as the ‘sleep mode’ is likely occurring downstream of the USB dongle.
Are there any config utilities that came with it? Failing that, maybe wireshark the dongle and see if there is any sort of sleep/wake signal being passed back through to the host machine?